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Sunday, February 22, 2015

Obama Is God; Dissent Is Heresy; Heresy Requires Death Threats. But This God Is Empty: A Vacuum.

Richard Fernandez hits it right: Obama is different. It's OK that Obama attacked Bush's patriotism. Bush was just Bush. Obama is God Almighty On Earth, and cannot be seen as anything else. His existence is the Legend; Obama IS the Narrative. The "palace guards", as Instapundit calls them, must avenge the insult, must neutralize the attack, must marginalize the attacker with all the venom and violence they can legally muster, short of actual assassination. The media and Obama are One. Together they are the Everything Theory of Progressive Moral Authority, the Unification of Lower Human Classes and the Elite Messiahs in Social Salvation. Obama is as sacred as Evolution.

A charismatic leader derives authority from himself; from an astounding life story, from attributes possessed by no other man. The approach has become common and we know the sort; the Native American who became a law professor and then Senator; the single mother who wanted to be a governor. The life-story is now standard, but Obama was clearly special. From the very beginning of his career Obama argued that his unique biography — his bi-racial parentage, foreign upbringing, his literary skills etc — made him a special person. By virtue of these gifts he could heal racial divisions; reach out to the Muslim world; bridge the gap between rich and poor and serve as a link between the generations.

By contrast most American presidents derived their greatness from the position, many simply political hacks who we remember today simply because they occupied the Oval Office. Obama marks the first time in recent memory when the office is deemed uplifted by the man and not the other way round. Charismatic leadership has its advantages, which is why it occurs repeatedly in history. It permits the charismatic person to “be bigger than the job” and do great things. Men with this attribute, like Alexander, Caesar or Napoleon seem to rise above the rules and constraints that bind mere human beings. It’s natural that Obama would prefer to be a ‘special’ president rather than an ordinary one.

Yet as someone said to a student who aspired to drop out of college “like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs”, you have to first be sure you can walk that walk before casting your academic career to the winds. Because charismatic leadership has some drawbacks. The most obvious being that since power flows from the person himself then when Rudy Giuliani publicly questioned Obama’s patriotism he was attacking the wellsprings of the administration.

When Giuliani told an audience ”I do not believe – and I know this is a horrible thing to say – but I do not believe that the President loves America,” he was inadvertently doing more than criticizing a president; he was in a manner of speaking, committing treason. The unprecedented firestorm of opprobrium that greeted Giuliani suggested that he had somehow hit a switch. It was like pushing an ordinary button in the wall and watching the skyscrapers out the window suddenly crumble in dust down into the ground.

What Giuliani had done was undermine Obama’s legitimacy. Because so much of Obama’s “power” comes from his special-ness that to question his patriotism is to strike at the basis for his governance. It was, as in a monarchy, tantamount to rebellion. The reason that similar remarks by Obama about George Bush’s patriotism evoked simple shrugs was because Bush was just an ordinary president, the latest in a line of politicians to occupy the office since George Washington.

But Obama is different. One cannot understand, for example, the vituperation vented by Dana Milbank at Scott Walker, calling him out for “cowardice”, arguing for his “disqualification” (yes those are the words) for the simple act of refusing to publicly repudiate Giuliani’s words about the president, unless one grasps this essential fact. Obama is different. The Obama phenomenon is founded so completely on his legend that to attack the legend is to undermine the very foundations of the tower on which he stands.

But this is not the first time the Obama myth has been directly impugned. The first major political figure to accidentally touch the Third Rail was Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has become an extraordinary hate object in the press, not because of any views he may hold on policy, but because Netanyahu had the temerity to disrespect Obama. Netanyahu must have been astonished by the charge of electricity that gave back on him.

Disrespect America, even attack it if you want, and you will not receive a tenth such voltage as did Netanyahu. The torrent of hostility poured upon Netanyahu was so out of proportion to any conceivable offense, that he probably felt obliged to persist in coming, reasoning that he must be on to something. Yet the myth of the president has been crumbling abroad for some time. Readers will recall that Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande recently made the almost unheard-of move of negotiating directly with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine without receiving instructions from the “leader of the free world”.

Obama is nothing if his "legend" is found empty. Those of us who paid attention in 2008 saw how deeply empty the vacuum of Obama truly is. One final excerpt:

"American credibility — and that of its cultural elite — now rests on a single point of failure: the narrative life history of the least vetted person in recent presidential politics. No republic, especially one as great as the United States, should ever be based on the such a fragile thing as the biography of a single man."

4 comments:

I think a fundamental assumption about Obama has been made which is totally wrong.

It is an understandable mistake. Given the ideology of his family, his mentors and associates, his political party, his pronouncements and his actions, it is natural to ASSUME that Obama is a man of the hard Left.

But then, there are so many puzzling inconsistencies and contradictions in his speech and actions if that assumption is true.

Merely as a thought experiment, examine Obama's speech and actions using a different fundamental assumption of the "core beliefs" that he espouses.

Assume he is a Muslim sympathizer, if not a "closet" Muslim, instead of an adherent of the hard Left.

His father (from whom his "dreams" came) was a Muslim. His step-father was a Muslim. He was trained as a child in a madrassa.

Why would he find it “convenient” (as a “beard”) to sit under the tutelage of a former Muslim for 20 years, a man who espousese black liberation theology and a virulent hatred of America?

“Hope and change” makes a nice vacuous statement that has no meaning unless one asks, “Hope FOR WHAT? Change INTO WHAT?”

What does he mean when he says his intention is to "fundamentally transform America?" (Apparently we Americans [ME INCLUDED] ALL ASSUMED that he meant into a "progressive" Utopia. What if it was instead into an Islamic state, or, at a minimum, into a subjugated member of the House of Submission?)

Why does he bow and scrape before Muslim potentates, and insult our longest and closest allies in democratic nations?

Why does he have such difficulty putting the word "radical" in front of the word "Islam," and the word "Islamic" anywhere in the vicinity of the word "terrorist"?

Why does he equivocate on the relative merits of Islam vice Christianity and Judaism? Is it not a Muslim trope to assert that Muslim have legitimate grievances against the West because of the Crusades and the Inquisition? The hard Left asserts that ALL religions are equally "not good." Muslims assert that only Islam is good and superior to Christianity and Judaism.

When a hard Leftist like Bill Maher has no difficulty calling ISIS what it is, why would a supposedly hard Leftist (as Obama supposedly is) have difficulty doing the same thing?

What sense does it make that Obama would direct NASA (of all agencies) to expand its "Muslim outreach"?

Why would a White House Summit on "Violent Extremism" so studiously avoid ever mentioning the source of 99% of the "violent extremism" currently plaguing the entire globe? Why would adherents of the primary source of that "violent extremism" be invited to read from their holy book and offer prayers, and all other faiths be excluded?

Why would the State Department make outrageously stupid statements about "Jobs for Jihadis" unless Obama had directed it to do so?

Why the lies about a video causing "spontaneous demonstrations" when a US Ambassador is killed and dragged through the streets?

Why are "red lines" drawn in the sand with the blood of the citizens of the Middle East, and then no support is given to them?

Why, when the "wrong" group of Muslims take power in Egypt, does Obama focus on marginalizing and restricting them, in solidarity with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the parent organization of every Muslim terrorist group in the world? When the ruling General issues a call for reformation of Islam, why does Obama contradict that need for modernization of the Islamic interpretations of the Qur'an?

Why, when an existential threat exists in a self-professed and self-named Islamic State does he dither and waffle and avoid even allowing the word "Islam" to be uttered except in denials that ISIS is Islamic? Why does he unilaterally insist on changing the name from "Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham" to the name "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant"? Do you really think that he is ignorant of the fact that the Levant is linguistically related to the Crusades and includes ALL of the following nations: Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Syria, and Turkey? If ISIS succeeds in recovering all of the "Levant," the "Little Satan" will have been destroyed.

Can you imagine a man of the Left inserting his political operatives into any nation in the world in an attempt to impact a democratic election, much less an election of a close ally? If not, then WHY DO SO ONLY IN ISRAEL?

There are many totalitarian impulses that are shared between the hard Left and Islam. To that extent, and when it serves his purpose (taqiyya and kitman), Obama parallels the Leftist rhetoric and agenda and does not correct the assumption that he is a Leftist. However, whenever there is a conflict between his Islamic faith and his Leftist ideology, the Islamic faith wins every time!

As the time for his departure from the Presidency gets closer, observe his speech and actions and see which explanation more closely aligns with his expressed views.

Sadly, we Americans have been gulled again by Muslim taqiyya and litman, combined with our own ideological assumptions (blinders) about this man. We have assumed onlt two possible explanations for his behavior, not realizing that NOTHING is ever solely "black and white."

It seems that it must be buried deep in his psyche; he never grew a beard, never went to prayer five times a day, didn't marry a hijab.

Yet his deepest sympathies seem to be with getting nukes ready in Iran while blaming Christians for domestic and foreign terror via DHS listings. He very likely doesn't know, even himself, why he does the things he does. He's a sick pup who flies in AF1 to Saudi funerals and shows hatefulness to the leader of Israel.

It seems that the right wing punditry is SLOWLY beginning to realize that Obama is NOT the "Progressive" that he is assumed to be. Sadly, the left wing punditry will never allow themselves to even consider the possibility of a Muslim sympathizer in the White House. What will it take to wake up America? Will the ISIS flag have to be flown over the White House for it to become obvious?

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